After a rocky first season, both compelling and cringe-worthy in equal doses, and sometimes all at the same time, Aaron Sorkin's "The Newsroom" is back for a second season and it has undergone some significant retooling. The writers' room was given a shakeup, and even as production got underway, Sor...

Nobody from SeaWorld agreed to an interview for "Blackfish," Gabriela Cowperthwaite's searing take on the theme park's mistreatment of killer whales and the dozens of deaths that have resulted from it.

The season-spanning story is designed to seem ambitious, but this Newsroom feels like a scaled-down show; there's less egregious overreach, but nothing's come in to replace it. It’s a tamed beast, no longer the unicorn of absurdity it once was. It's less of a disappointment, but mainly because we kn...

Dysfunctional families are the crème de la crème subject for artists: the potential for laughs and intense drama is too attractive, and anyone who's had a proper childhood should have plenty of real life experiences to mine from. But all this attention given to the rag-tag blood bunches has taken al...

In director Cullen Hoback’s “Terms And Conditions May Apply,” he seems to be dealing with several issues, some political, some social, none all that clear. Of course, he’s diving into the morass of conflicts between capitalism and politics, an unholy marriage that acts as a cultural ouroborous for a...

The biggest player on indie theater screens this weekend may be the Trayvon Martin murder case. The Sundance-winning "Fruitvale Station" is based on an incident about the police killing of a young African-American man in 2009, but its perspective on race-fueled violence in American society clearly e...

“He didn’t like to be left alone.” Oscar Grant’s mother Wanda, played superbly by Octavia Spencer, delivers this line in one of the most compelling scenes in the film. It is a detail, that when considered in the context of the story, hits us on all sides, and most importantly, in the heart.